🎙️ Turning Fear Into Fuel: The Mindset Behind Billion-Dollar Founders with Patrick Sweeney II

Emotional intelligence and leadership drive unicorn success as Patrick Sweeney II reveals how fear, failure, and heart-centered leadership shape elite founders.

Why do only a few founders build billion-dollar companies? In this episode, Patrick Sweeney II shares why even the most successful entrepreneurs struggle, and how the difference lies in turning failures into lessons, transforming fear into fuel, and leading with a pure heart.

Patrick Sweeney II is a globally recognized entrepreneur, investor, and thought leader who has advised and worked with high-growth companies and elite founders. Known for his insights on fear, resilience, and leadership, he helps entrepreneurs develop the mindset required to reach extraordinary levels of success.

👉 Connect with Patrick Here: 

LinkedIn:  linkedin.com/in/thefearguru

Website: pjsweeney.com / fearisfuel.com

#LeadershipDevelopment #EmotionalIntelligence #EntrepreneurMindset #UnicornStartups #FearToFuel #FounderMindset #Resilience #BusinessLeadership #HumanPotential #PeakPerformance

✨ 🌎 Want to reach your peak potential?

Discover nervous system mastery through Dr. Campbell's trainings and explore how emotional intelligence transforms your performance:
👉 Visit Dr. Campbell's website: https://drjacquelinecampbell.com/self-mastery-tools

🔗 And stay connected as we build a community of growth minded visionary leaders: https://linktr.ee/drjacquelinecampbell

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This space in between a founder's vision and what the rest of the world thinks. And I call that the belief gap. And great founders will navigate across that belief gap by bringing in other believers, right? They'll bring in new employees. So those become internal believers. They'll bring in customers and partners and investors, and those are external believers. So they have to have this belief. So that's why I've adopted it to be the Buddha loop. So be for believe, observe, orient, decide, and act.

SPEAKER_02 0:32

And then welcome to the Resilient Minds podcast. Stories of grit, growth, and success. On this show, we focus on the real stories behind the success, the struggles, the resilience, and the courage it took to keep moving forward even when times got tough. My goal is to provide you with stories of hope and transformation, showing that no matter the challenges, there is a way forward, and you can find it.

SPEAKER_03 1:07

Hi, I'm your host, Dr. Campbell, and I'm here with Patrick Sweeney II. He is a five-time CEO and founder, a venture capitalist, and an investor in more than 75 startups. And I mean, I've had a startup before. It is incredibly difficult. So, from you know, my personal thank you, I really appreciate what you do for people. Um, and he's also a former Olympic level rower, which I'm fascinated about. Um, that kind of athletic uh ability. You said that it's a full-body workout. I love, I love all the things that you're into. Thank you so much for joining us, Patrick.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Jacqueline, thank you so much for having me here today. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_03 1:46

Sure, sure. So you have your hands in so many different things, but it seems like you're really at you're at the point in your life where you're probably just helping mentor and support all of those of us who are still really struggling through the grid of it. Like, what do you what do you do day in and day out?

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Day in and day out. I'd say it's it's probably never the same. So uh the last 18 months has really been focused on my book that releases April 1st, and um working with a handful of portfolio companies from uh from our venture funds to help them succeed and and get onto this unicorn status. And that's really my goal now. It's uh uh I've had to think a lot about how to go from success to significance. And my way of doing that is to help create a thousand unicorns. So I want to help people build companies worth a billion dollars in value. And uh I've been doing that, you know, as as much as I can over the past uh two years or so.

SPEAKER_03 2:48

That's beautiful. I love that, and it's um it's incredibly like I I work with clients and I see them grow and I see them transform. I'm sure you see the same thing supporting, it's not just about money, right? Like you're seeing people grow. And it's instead of doing a job or working, being able to give back in significance is so much more impactful, I find.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:12

Um, but a lot of individuals I feel like that get to that point, that's what they do. Like they just want to give back now that significance.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

And and it's amazing, Jacqueline, too, because when you start giving back, you you get more, right? It it's it's the the people. Um, and I I use this in my investing strategy as well. And it's the people who are trying to solve a problem that they have or a problem that maybe you know, someone in their family or friends have have dealt with who create the best companies. The people who start a company to get rich are the ones who struggle the most, right? And and I've seen a lot of people, I I had a uh I look at a lot of deals every year. So I get great chances to invest in in interesting people. And the people are always uh, you know, the most important thing that I look at. And then I've got a few other criteria that I go into. But I had um I had a couple guys come to me last summer with this idea for uh, you know, the dollar shave club where you pay a monthly fee. And they so they had a dollar shave club for women's health for for you know tampons and and pads and everything else, which I thought was a brilliant idea. And uh and I and I said it makes a lot of sense. They said, Yeah, we're gonna do something where we go to the work and the workplace will fund it, or they can come to their home. And I said, you know, tell me about your uh leadership team. And they didn't have a single woman on the leadership team. And I said, you know, why why are you guys doing this? And and they basically said, you know, we think we can flip the company in two or three years and, you know, exit. And they didn't have uh an emotional or a um, you know, a personal reason for doing it. They just thought it was a good idea. And so that's that's not the profile, you know. Maybe they'll be successful in in the end, but it's not the profile that I look for. I want people who are um, you know, solving a problem that they face or their family face or something that they're really familiar and experienced with.

SPEAKER_03 5:17

Right. To me, it sounds like substance.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 5:23

Uh what? So what was the name of your book?

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Uh so my last book, which hit number five on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list.

SPEAKER_03 5:32

Congratulations.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

That's the one fear is fuel. And it's all the neuroscience of how to turn your fear and what normally debilitates people into the fuel for uh super high-level performance. So that was my last book. Uh came out five years ago. And then the current one that comes out April 1st is called The Founders' Creed. And the Founders' Creed is about how you can create a unicorn by adopting um this doctrine called the Buddha Loop, B-O-O-D-A. And that's adopted from a military strategy, uh air-to-air combat training that's that's been used for the past 50 years in the United States and has been adapted to uh the Marine Corps to maneuver warfare and uh to sports teams and everything else. And that's called the OODA loop. And it's it's quite famous by a uh Air Force colonel named John Boyd. But the OODA loop is a fantastic decision-making mechanism. So it's observe, orient, decide, and act. And then you go through the loop again. And it works incredibly well for fighter pilots, right? For top gun pilots. And the reason they can start out with just the OODA loop is because they already have the belief that they're the best in the world, that they've got the best um planes, they've got the most high-tech uh electronics, they've got the best weaponry, they do more training hours than anybody else. So they have an inherent belief or an a conviction that they're the best. So, because of that belief, they can just go into the observe, orient, decide, and act. But when you're a founder, when you're starting your own company, you have a vision of what the world can be like in five years. Maybe you're thinking, okay, you know, Elon Musk is a great example. Let's go back 15 years. He's on this side of the spectrum saying, I can build an electric car that goes 250 miles on a single charge that's faster than a Porsche, that has a beautiful big TV on the inside, and I can do it all for$35,000. And the rest of the world is over here saying, You're crazy. You know, there's there's no way that, you know, Toyota can't even do a hybrid well, and you're you're talking about an all-electric car. So there's this space in between a founder's vision and what the rest of the world thinks. And I call that the belief gap. And great founders will navigate across that belief gap by bringing in other believers, right? They'll bring in new employees, so those become internal believers. They'll bring in customers and partners and investors, and those are external believers. So they have to have this belief. So that's why I've adopted it to be the Buddha loop. So be for believe, observe, orient, decide, and act. And then the quicker you get through those loops, the more data you get back, the more information, the more competitive you are. So the Buddha doctrine is really a decision-making um platform that allows you to scale a company very quickly. And that's that's why, you know, it's the perfect tool for companies that want to get into that hyper growth mode and become unicorns.

SPEAKER_03 8:47

Right. Um, I love one, I have to get both of your books.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Um, but I'll get you signed copies.

SPEAKER_03 8:54

Wonderful. Thank you so much. Um, I was just thinking, like, there's so many people that I've talked to that are into the hustle culture. They want to scale, they want to get to the billion dollars, but they're doing it the wrong way and they're doing it with the wrong intentions. And those ones cause so many problems. They hurt themselves, their family, the people that are working with and for them, but also their clients because it's just not quality. And then what I've seen, and I would love to know your take on this, is the companies where the founders, their heart is in it, their passion, even their souls in it, and they bring together the right people with the right vision. When stress hits, it kind of goes along with your first book. Like it changes that fear into more adrenaline and passion, and it drives the vision forward. Instead, even though there's there may be consistent shifts or changes or you get a pivot, things go wrong, right? Like they work through it more as a team. What's your take on that?

SPEAKER_00 9:55

Yeah, so I, you know, it's it's the um alignment that you're talking about that's critical, right? And so if you've got that motivation, if you're a if you're a founder who thinks that you're gonna change the world for the better, you're gonna do something really good, you're gonna leave your dent in the world, then that motivation is pure. And if you can get everyone aligned and going in the same direction, so oftentimes, and I had this in my first company, so I I had the first uh real cloud hosting company, the about four years before before Amazon Web Services was even started. Uh, I had a company called Server Vault, and we were putting people's data in the cloud, and um it was very secure, and you were trying to focus on government clients and insurance companies and banks and that sort of thing. So we had this really strong conviction, the whole founders team. But for me, it was an illusion of agreement. We weren't in agreement. We all thought like our mission was to secure the internet, and this is 1999. So people were afraid to you know put a credit card on the internet or put their personal information. And so we wanted to secure the internet and make it the place where you could do real business. And for our CTO, it meant we had the best technology, we had the strongest firewalls, the the latest intrusion detection. He was the guy who re-architected the Pentagon's network after the Pentagon got got hacked into. So he had this vision of a fortress, right? And that was securing the internet to him. Our uh VPSL, Sue, she had this vision of every client gets a custom solution. So we're gonna make you know one really strong for Wells Fargo. We want uh the NFL wants really fast, so we'll do a custom solution there. And then our chief operating officer, Mark, he wanted scalability, right? He wanted to be able to provision 50 clients a day, put them up online, get them, get them moving, everything's standardized. And we all thought we were securing the internet. We all thought we were going after our mission and what we talked about, but that illusion of agreement came to bear when we were all sitting around saying, okay, well, we need, you know, JB said more security, Lottie said more scalability, Sue said more flexibility. And these things didn't align. So, so once we started to create what I call a shared belief map, we looked at all the things that are critical to the company and that are factual. So, for example, if you're a um, let's say you're you're a company that's trying to help um patients with with um you know staying staying fit or losing weight uh at home, and and you know that in the United States, 50% of the population is obese. That's one of your core ideologies, right? So you know you've got 150 people, 150 million people in the US who are potential clients. That's a core belief, and that's something that you don't have to prove. And everyone gets aligned around three or four core beliefs that are really important to your business. Then you look for four or five hypotheses that are gonna help you prove that your solution or your product is the right fit for that. And and the first one, if there's 150 million people who are obese, you can say, I want to affect 10% of those people with our solution. And so then you say, Okay, well, that means the 150 million, we're gonna get 15 million people as our target market. So every day we've got to get uh new clients put on on board. And if we put on 100 this week and 300 next week, and a thousand the week after that, and we can we can really scale up, then we're meeting our goal. And so you've proven that hypothesis. If all of a sudden you've got, you know, 10 customers coming on board and 10 the next week and five the week after that, it's time to hit the kill switch, right? Because you know you're not going to get up to 15 million people, 20 million people scaling like that. So having a core ideology that you set the company on and then agreeing on the hypotheses that you want to test, and then assigning each hypothesis to only one person, right? So you have to have a single owner of each one of your your critical hypotheses because that that eliminates any of the gas or a shared belief map, proving out everything that you as a company believe and stand for is really what gives uh strong direction to companies that are scaling and dealing very quickly with hypergrowth.

SPEAKER_03 14:41

Right. Because you have people, they're everybody's focusing on different parts. And if you don't have that main alignment, then it looks like you're working together when you're really not.

SPEAKER_00 14:51

Exactly. That's exactly right. And that's why so many companies fail after they do their Series A, right? They they've got a product that the market has validated, and they've got some sales and they've got customers, then they go out and raise all this money and they raise it, and and they end up splintering the company because they're not aligned. They don't have that shared belief on where the resources should be going. So people just started doing their own things, and before they know it, the company's you know imploded or they're selling it just for the technology, or they've got to do another fundraising round.

SPEAKER_03 15:26

Yeah, and that's unfortunate if I mean, of course, it causes everybody stress, time, money, and energy, right? But that's really discouraging if you're that founder with this amazing world-changing idea. You there's usually easier ways to do things, but you have to look at the finer tooth um situations. And people who've actually been through it, I find, are the ones who are coaching those of us who are still going through it. So have you been through one of those really heartbreaking losses of a business?

SPEAKER_00 15:58

Yeah, so and and uh interestingly enough, Jacqueline, it was my most recent one. So it was my last startup, which was called DaVinci 3.0, and it was a modular high performance computing solution. So we originally designed it as a green, uh, uh ecologically friendly way of Bitcoin mining, right? Because Bitcoin and and the whole crypto world is you know going to dramatically impact the world's economy and every every financial system. So it's not going away, but it's not being done in a way that's environmentally friendly. So uh so we took this technology out of MIT and built up, you know, basically these modular systems, and we didn't follow the Buddha doctrine, right? So we just assumed that things were that, you know, our idea was great, the team was the smartest that I'd ever put together, you know, we had uh great interest from people, but as we kept building, we weren't testing out our hypotheses, right? I we weren't saying, okay, well, if if we're building this solution, you know, we're gonna put in all the computing power that a Bitcoin miner needs, and they can drop it on uh, you know, on site where they're making where there's power generation, and we'll have this really elegant solution. People love it, it's cheaper, it's better for the environment, it's perfect. Well, what we didn't realize, because we weren't going through the boot loops, we didn't realize that the main monopoly chip provider that does Bitcoin mining wouldn't validate any um warranty or any support if the chips were immersed in cooling fluid. So this was all liquid cooling based, so we could get a lot of high density with uh much more efficiency from a um in an energy perspective, but it immediately voided the warranty of the the thousands of chips that we were putting in the immersion fluid. We didn't realize this till the end. And so uh, you know, I had I had put a couple million dollars of my own money in there that you know was a complete write-off. And I had a bunch of friends and and um colleagues from this this group called YPO, Young Presidents Organization, that put in their money as well, and uh and it was you know all a loss. And uh part of it was the collapse of the crypto um market with uh Sam Bankman-Fried uh and and everything that happened there. And then part of it was was just us not going through the Buddha loops, right? Not using the the doctrine. And that's that's the reason I wrote this book, is I learned so much from that experience, you know, that I I want to share that with everyone else in the with the goal of creating a thousand unicorns, you know, helping a lot of people succeed.

SPEAKER_03 18:56

Well, I appreciate that. And I'm sorry that the best lessons come from hard lessons, right? They do. That book is gonna help so many people not do the same thing. But no matter how much we know, it's like we're still learning. Like there's always new lessons as long as you're making the new ones happen, not old ones.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

Yeah, that's well, that's it. You know, that's what that's what I always say is is you're gonna keep getting faced with the same situation until you learn from that, you know, from that, you learn the lesson from that situation. And so you'll keep you'll keep having the same problems if you keep approaching them the same way.

SPEAKER_03 19:35

Yeah. So I I appreciate you saying that because that gives me a lot of validation, um, right? Because that's that's just what I keep holding on to. I'm like, as long as it's a new mistake, then you're fine.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 19:48

You keep using the word unicorn. What does that mean?

SPEAKER_00 19:52

So unicorn in the uh in the startup world is a company that has a value of more than a billion dollars.

SPEAKER_02 20:00

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 20:01

So so um three of the companies that I've worked with have now become unicorns. And um I'll give you a great example with one of my adventure partners. So uh a Finnish guy named Sami Inkin. He and I met at the Leadville 100 uh mountain bike race, and he had just started a company called Trulia, which did uh real estate evaluation and and everything else. He he and his partner uh Peter Flint built it uh when they were still at Stanford in graduate school, and they were doing, you know, it was online real estate appraisal and and sales and and that sort of thing. And it was so new, you know, it was it the investors just thought it was the craziest thing they ever heard of. It was like ordering ordering sushi through the mail. Like, why would why should we put uh homes up on the website? And uh they were really ahead of their time, but they got everyone across the belief gap, right? They got employees who believed what they were doing. They found realtors were really fighting what they were doing, right? Because they they thought they'd lose their jobs. And and um, but they got external believers, they got internal believers, they crossed the gap and they ended up selling the company for three and a half billion dollars. In um uh, and so he started another company that I'm an angel investor in that's trying to cure type two diabetes, and they're doing it not with drugs, but with diet and exercise and measurement, and and they've got uh millions of people now on the Virta platform, and they'll probably do an IPO this year, right? They they've had a tremendous start, and things are going really well for them. And Sami is uh, you know, he and I have done adventures all over the world. So we've done mountain biking races and climbs and everything else on four continents, I think. And uh, and one of things he always says is running a startup is like chewing glass. And uh and he said if you're you know if you're gonna chew glass every morning then it's just as easy to do it to create a hundred million dollar company as it is to create a one million dollar company. And I think that's where a lot of people that I know and and and I see you know I do a lot of keynote speeches and and uh speak at schools and that sort of thing like colleges business schools and one of the things that surprises me is that the the people who have great success are are just normal people right there they're the only difference between you know the people who are super successful and people I've met who aren't is really just their attitude and whether or not they have a uh they they impose a their own performance ceiling you know on on themselves and they say you know I should I don't deserve to be my you know my parents were Irish immigrants I I was the first person to go to college and you know if I make a hundred thousand dollars a year I'm doing great and and they hit that right and then they come back down and they hit that and they come back down and they're they're the type of person who could be making a million dollars a year but they don't necessarily believe it.

SPEAKER_03 23:16

Right because it's our our potential and we're the ones that are limiting it.

SPEAKER_00 23:20

Yeah a hundred percent and and you know I and I've spoken to more than 500 CEOs in the past maybe three or four years since since the other book came out. So I'll I'll speak at um um these YPO groups and one of the things that shocked me when I first started was in in YPO you have to be running a company bigger than$20 million. And there are uh hundreds if not thousands of CEOs who are running companies worth several hundred million and uh so they're they're successful entrepreneurs successful hired CEOs and 90% of the CEOs that uh I talked to after I did these speaking gigs have had one of the things that most people have and they think they're the only ones who who feel this way imposter syndrome. So 90% of the CEOs that I met all over the world have had uh a bout with imposter syndrome. And just knowing that I think should give anyone comfort when they start to doubt themselves and that doubt starts to creep in they say look the the COO of Facebook uh Cheryl Sandberg who's a you know YPOer she's she's had imposter syndrome she's wondered why she was up on the stage before so it happens to all of us it's just a natural reaction and if you you know that you can press through it.

SPEAKER_03 24:43

Absolutely I love the the wealth of knowledge that you're giving the audience right now um and I I personally really appreciate it. Before we have to hop off today though what would you say are the three most important things that you've done for yourself that have gotten you where you are today first and foremost has been health.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

So when uh 20 plus years ago when I was 35 I woke up one morning could barely get out of bed uh felt terrible my arm was all swollen and I was living this this lifestyle um you know I was I was constantly scared so I was producing all this cortisol which is the stress hormone and it was just coursing through my body and it I I didn't recognize what was going on. And so what I did was do what a lot of people do when they feel that stress I I started drinking and I drank somewhere between six and 10 drinks and cocktails every night. And um you know I'd go to a venture capital event or I go to some networking event and drink there. And then I'd come home and I'd feel guilty about it, right? The whole Irish Catholic thing. And so I'd get I'd I'd fall asleep at you know one o'clock in the morning and I'd wake up at five to hit the gym. And I'd hit the gym and then I'd be so tired I'd have to have a Diet Coke with caffeine to keep me going through the morning and another diet coke at lunch and two more diet cokes in the afternoon. So I'm I was just living this toxic lifestyle all because of fear. And then one morning I end up waking up and I can't even get out of bed. The local hospital says you know we'll we'll do some tests and uh you know we'll get back to you in the afternoon but it looks like you have a staph infection in your arm and we see that with guys who go to the gym a lot. And uh he said the nurse will take some blood and she'll give you a call in the afternoon. Well the nurse didn't call me back the doctor called me back and he said I don't know what it is but here in Reston Virginia we don't have the capability of finding out I want you to go up to Johns Hopkins and get to the bottom of this because they're the best uh hospital in the world. So I went up to Hopkins did a ton of tests and they basically said we don't know if the treatment we're going to use will work. So um if it doesn't you've probably got two weeks left to live you might want to get your affairs in order and say your goodbyes. Now at this point I had a one year old daughter and my wife was six months pregnant and I'm thinking I'm about to die. And the only thing I felt at that point was a tremendous sense of regret because I I had all these fears you know my my real fear my root fear started from being afraid to fly. So I I saw a plane crash when I was six years old and it just left this impression on me and I did everything I could to avoid getting onto an airplane right I'd drive or I'd make excuses and and then when I'm sitting there at Hopkins I I thought well you know this is ridiculous. I've been I was afraid of everything and now I'm gonna die and I'm gonna die anyways and I missed out on family reunions I missed out on spring break I missed out on all this on on life I said if I get out of here I'm gonna learn how to get over that fear of flying and I'm gonna be the kind of dad that can take his daughter to Disney World and hop on a plane or or get on a plane to Ireland to go back to see her family. And I'm gonna be a courageous dad and not to give away the ending but I lived and as my immune system came back I decided I was gonna take flying lessons and I took flying lessons and the first two were absolutely terrifying and then after that a strange thing started to happen the more I understood about the physics about the safety systems of all that all that I fell in love with flying. It became one of the most fulfilling exciting um just just rewarding experiences. So I got my private license I got my instrument rating I got my commercial license my seaplane rating and now I fly stunt planes for for fun and I realized from that experience that all your dreams are on the other side of fear. So if if we want anything in life if we have bold aspirations you have to expect that there's going to be fear there's gonna be unexpected challenges there's going to be a lot of discomfort but once you get to the other side of that it's just an absolutely amazing life that you'll lead. Right absolutely I think that there's a lot of value in that first book too yeah the fear fear is fuel uh has helped a lot of people yeah for sure the founders creed the the new book is you know very specific to entrepreneurs uh and people who want to start their companies and grow their companies but um but both have a lot of neuroscience in it right I bet um it sounds like I could really nerd out on that that my specialty has been neuroscience for quite a while but it it's never um boring it continues to fascinate me um so uh but at the same time it's very hard navigating it in real life too it sure is all right well thank you so much for your time today I appreciate having you on well it was great to be here and thank you uh to all your listeners for for listening in on us thank you